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Over the past few years the equipment I take on holidays (vacations) had shrunk to a Canon HF100 video camera, Panasonic Lumix LC3 camera and Macbook. The cameras are compact and capable of excellent results, but the Macbook while not enormous is still bulky. Since my holiday usage is storing photo’s and video with a bit of email and web browsing the ideal replacement would seem to be a netbook. Read more…

In a couple of previous posts I mentioned having problems with my original Snow Leopard hackintosh install. Most appeared to be related to permissions, with certain settings reverting after a reboot. For example, I change the background colour of my finder windows to grey instead of white, and every time I restarted this would change back to white again. I also always got a few unrepairable permissions errors when using Disk Utility’s repair function. Nothing major, and while everything important worked fine there were enough minor irritations to start me looking at an alternative install method. Read more…

Apple this week released Security Update 2010-001 for Leopard and Snow Leopard Systems. The Update offers fixes for CoreAudio, CUPS, Flash Player, ImageIO, ImageRAW and OpenSSL and is a recommended update for all Leopard and Snow Leopard Users. I have now had a chance to install and test the update on my main Hackintosh and can report no found issues so far, so anyone using a similar method of installation should be fine to install through Software Update.

Over the past week I have done a re-install of Snow Leopard on my main Hackintosh, following some small irritations with permissions on the original install. As usual I made a backup to another hard drive then imported my user account and applications once Snow Leopard was patched to 10.6.2. This time round I have used a Boot132 CD and Chameleon 2 RC4, so over the next week I hope to update my original Snow Leopard on Hackintosh guide and create a new one to reflect the new method.

Part 1 of this article detailed the hardware used for the install, so I’m now going to detail the steps involved in installing using the Boot132 method. There are some software packages that are useful to have ready to go on a flash drive to ensure they are accessible if your network is not working after a vanilla install.

It’s been a few months since I built my hackintosh, and it continues to work very well with few problems. In the months since I built it there have been some interesting advances in ease of setup, so I’m taking a look at some of these over the next few days. The ultimate goal of this is to try a fresh installation starting with boot132/chameleon and an unmodified Leopard DVD.

Another of the new tools that greatly simplifies the setup of your new install is osx86tools. The app presents an easy to use graphical interface to the actions that typically require terminal use to achieve. This includes setting permissions for the extensions folder, clearing cache’s, update prebinding, touching the extensions folder, backing up and restoring the kernel/extensions folder, Install multiple kexts to any drive, Installing PC_EFI v8 or Chameleon and adding EFI strings and modifying com.apple.Boot.plist. That’s quite a list and not even everything the program can do. One of the really impressive features is automatic analysis of your system and downloading of drivers and modified kexts to get it all working. Sounds very easy, so this will be getting a good workout when the new install is in place.